Fugitives of the Stars [The Two Thousand Centuries] Read online

  Fife smiled to himself and played hungrily with the weapon, keys on the board before him. Horne spoke to him and then held out his hand to Chell, who wrapped the tip of a tentacle around it.

  "Okay,” said Horne. “Let's go."

  He nodded to Lurgh and the purple gargoyle, and stepped in through the hatch door, and the whole weird crew padded after him into the secret corridors of the brain.

  CHAPTER XIV

  THE MOUNTAIN was a skull and Horne walked within it, a micro-organism moving through the convoluted tunnels of the brain that filled its great domed hollowness.

  There was light in the brain, for the other human microorganisms that served it must see to move. There were catwalks provided for their moving. One of these stretched from an arched opening on the far side of the entrance chamber, a narrow spidery thing that stretched away and away, apparently into infinity, one long straight thread traversing a mass of support cables.

  After the dim rock gallery, the suffused fight and complex perspectives of this place confused Horne's eyes and made him dizzy. For comfort he looked upward to the smooth round roof of the bore, but it was too close above his head and gave him a claustrophobic feeling of being smothered and deep-buried.

  So he looked down.

  The catwalk hung above a huge transparent tube. This was what the webbed cables supported, this glassy vein that ran from everlasting to everlasting, carrying inside itself a thick mass of wires in many colors. The wires were like a schematic diagram of a bundle of nerve fibers, and Horne realized that that was exactly what they were. This, according to the guard, was one of the main ganglia, serving a whole portion of the brain. Looking at the bundled wires, it was difficult for Horne to rid himself of an unpleasant feeling that they were alive.

  Was thinking aliveness? Where did you draw the fine line between sentience and unawareness?

  And if this mighty thing inside of which they walked was conscious was it conscious of them? The skin between Horne's shoulders crawled when that idea crossed his mind.

  "It's nothing but a damned big overgrown computer,” he said, as much to reassure himself as the others.

  It did not seem to reassure the others. There was not much expression at any time in the purple face of D'quar, but it seemed to Horne that the gargoyle moved slowly, unwillingly, looking from side to side and saying nothing. The others, especially Lurgh and his hairy big double from Allamar, were obviously uneasy. These simple humanoids, who knew next to nothing of science, didn't like being here at all.

  Nor were Horne's words any reassurance to himself. He might fight down the semi-superstitious repulsion he felt, but he could not disguise the fact this colossal computer-call it a brain, call it living, or not—gave those who possessed it a tremendous power to wield against their enemies. More and more, Horne began to understand the horror and fear that Yso and Ewan had felt when they had learned the nature of the Project.

  "Come on," he said roughly to his hesitating, motley crew of followers.

  Below the tube, a long way down from the catwalk on which they stood, was the bottom of the round bore.

  Horne looked over his shoulder at D'quar, who was standing hesitantly with one big-clawed foot on the catwalk, as though he didn't like the idea of trusting his knotty bulk to this frail strand.

  "Think how much worse it'll be for your nine-foot friends like Lurgh,” he said. “But at that, I think we'd better space ourselves out. Don't follow me too closely and don't have two heavy ones right together."

  He started out along the narrow way, hanging tightly to the hand ropes.

  The catwalk was not rigid. He felt the sway as D'quar came on behind him. The cables, woven of some neutral, nonmagnetic plastic, creaked and sprang. Horne set his teeth and walked on, trying not to think of how far it was to the floor and the inevitable alarms that would be set off if they all came crashing down into the tube.

  It was hard to tell in this place how far you had come or how far you had yet to go. Horne looked back once or twice and saw his little band of all-sized, all-colored, all-shaped monstrosities strung out behind him, stepping with infinite care, the two hairy giants separated by large intervals and bent almost on all fours.

  "Horne's Foreign Legion,” he thought sourly, and then was a little ashamed of the thought. The humanoids were coming back into a place of torment from which they had escaped, of their own free will, and that took bravery.

  Behind the strung-out line of them, the catwalk ended at the arch from which they had come. The next time he looked back, the arch had dwindled into the pinpoint nothingness of distance.

  There was something hypnotic and horrifying about it, as though you had gotten into a spatial warp without beginning or end and would go on through eternity until the whole cosmos collapsed and prepared to recycle.

  He was glad when he came upon a branching sideline where a slim bundle of fibers separated from the parent stem and curved off into a huge chamber. There was a branch of the catwalk, too, and he could have gone into the chamber, but he only stopped long enough to see that it was crammed with banks of tubes and transistors and miles of circuiting. There was a constant flickering of little lights and a soft buzzing and clicking that sounded eerily like somebody muttering busily to himself.

  They passed several of these huge chambers. Horne thought about how many more of them there must be in the bulk of the mountain and how deep and far the labyrinthine twinings of these nerve paths and chambered cells must reach on all sides of him. And they're building it still bigger, he thought. And think what men like Ardric can do with such power.

  He wondered how Yso and Ewan and the aliens with them were doing with their side of it.

  He was sure of one thing. If he couldn't do both, it was more important to smash this great lurking giant than to clear his own name. In the long run, he supposed, the one would follow the other anyway, even though he might not be around to see it.

  Out of the hypnotic web before him emerged an archway much like the one they had left behind. This would be the main-ganglion relay-center the guard had described.

  Horne lifted his hand in warning. In utter silence he moved forward and the others followed him like ghosts.

  This arch had a door in it. Horne pushed it open.

  There was a big circular room with panels all around it. Two men, obviously engineers and wearing no uniforms, were going about their business of seeing that the impulse streams were flowing properly in this division of the brain, that there was no block or overload. They looked up startled as Horne came through the door and one of them said, “Is there trouble along the line there? The instruments didn't show—"

  "Yes,” Horne said, “there's trouble. But not quite the kind you mean. D'quar!"

  He pulled the stolen gun from the holster of his stolen uniform and said to the engineers, “Stand perfectly still and you won't be harmed."

  They stood still and their eyes grew big and their faces white as D'quar and giant Lurgh and the rest of the motley crew poured in through the doorway.

  "Is this a slave rising?” asked one of them.

  Horne said devoutly, “I hope so."

  The man made a brave but perfectly futile rush for a communicator. Lurgh was nearest him and the nine-foot giant picked the man up and cuffed him along the side of the head, and there was no further movement from him.

  The other man resigned himself to being bound. While D'quar saw to this, Horne was opening other hatch-doors.

  Three of them gave onto main tubes like the one they had just come from. The fourth opened onto a lift.

  If the guard they had captured had told the truth, at the bottom of the lift was the central room of Administration.

  Horne took a deep breath and turned to his tensely waiting alien followers. “Well,” he said, “we, might as well go."

  They crowded in and Horne pushed the button. The round chamber dropped with vertiginous swiftness down the shaft.

  When Horne heard the first whine o
f the air cushion he said, “Come out with a rush and arm yourselves as soon as you can."

  D'quar said, “What if the others do not come?"

  "Then,” said Horne, “we'll just have to hold on until they arrive."

  Brave words, he thought. The only trouble was that he didn't feel that way at all. He had been forced to do more fighting the last few days than he had done in his whole life, but he still didn't like it and didn't think he ever would. They were committed now and he might as well put on a good front.

  The lift slowed and stopped and the door slid open.

  There was a narrow corridor in front of the lift, with rows of identical doors on either side of it. There was nobody in the corridor. Horne led the way swiftly to the end of it.

  Here a round space perhaps three hundred feet in diameter and almost as high had been hollowed out of the very heart of the mountain. Buildings of steel and glass filled all the circular space except for the center and the streets that radiated from it, dividing the buildings into separate blocks.

  The streets, Horne knew, connected with the entrances from Rillah and the private base where the Vellae ships landed with slaves, and also with the galleries and work-centers around the periphery of the brain. It was from one of these streets that the other slaves led by Yso and Ewan, were supposed to pour in to the attack.

  There was no sign of them yet. But some sort of alarm had roused the center. Behind the glass window-walls of the buildings, technicians at the many input-output devices of the brain were turning from their work and peering out into the plaza. Here there was a noise and men were running, technicians and scientists hurrying for cover, red-uniformed guards coming from various directions and disappearing along one particular street that lay to Horne's left.

  A number of them were coming out of a building with a sign that said, Project Guard Office. It was not too far around the plaza, to Horne's right.

  All Horne's muscles tightened and the old hate burned up in him so strongly that he felt invincible.

  "Ardric's there,” he said to his companions. “Let's get him."

  He ran out across the plaza.

  There was a sudden cessation of movement among the people as they became aware of him in his red uniform and then saw the monstrous group that followed him. Somebody shouted in a voice of panic that the slaves were already here. The unarmed, non-uniformed men began to run away, spreading wild confusion around the plaza, and the guards stopped going wherever they were headed and swung around to shoot at Horne's little mob. But they could not fire effectively for the moment without killing a lot of their own people. They hesitated and, in the meantime, Horne had reached the door of the Guard Office and pushed it violently open and gone through it into the place beyond, with the aliens pouring in after him.

  The Guard communication center was here. Operators bent tensely over their instruments, listening to a bedlam of voices, transmitting orders and instructions given by their chief.

  The chief, wearing the red guard uniform but otherwise unchanged since the last time Horne had seen him aboard the Vega Queen, was a man with a clean-cut intelligent face, too thin and cruel around the mouth and too flint-hard in the eyes, not trying now to be pleasant but full of the alert anger of a man attacked.

  Horne sprang, just as Ardric looked up.

  CHAPTER XV

  HORNE HAD a brief glimpse of Ardric, startled, forming a name with his lips, reaching for his gun. Then he was toppling over among the astonished operators and Horne went with him, his hands, his knees, his whole body savagely engaged in paying Ardric some small part of what he owed him.

  They rolled and thrashed in fierce silence on the floor, among the frantic legs of the operators and the leaping forms of the aliens who were subduing them. There was a frightful noise. Voices shouted metallically from the communicators, demanding to know what was happening.

  D'quar picked up a microphone and roared in his hoarse, heavy voice, “We have the Center, that's what's happening. You're caught between us—” and he howled his triumph and his hate at the unseen guards who were fighting his fellow-slaves somewhere in the outer galleries.

  Horne, only dimly aware of these extraneous things, thought that D'quar was exulting too soon. But he didn't care. All he cared about was that at last he had Ardric in the grip of his two hands.

  Ardric was fighting back. Horne's mouth was full of blood and his face was cut and his body was bruised, but that was all right too. It was good. He had Ardric's neck finally in the bend of his forearm and was pressing back, pressing back—

  Two enormous hairy hands opened Horne's grip as easily as if he had been a child. A second pair of hands extracted Ardric and held him, half-conscious, the skin of his cheeks already mottled blue.

  Horne looked up a little dazedly into the face of Lurgh and his fellow giant, and Lurgh said, “You wanted this one alive. Remember?"

  Horne staggered up, still dazed. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, see that he doesn't get away."

  The communications center was a shambles. The operators were wounded, dead or escaped. About half the aliens were armed now and the others were searching the inner rooms for weapons. D'quar was still roaring his defiance, his gargoyle face unrecognizable now, and Horne made a frantic effort to quiet them down, to get them into some sort of order before the inevitable happened.

  The guards outside began their counter-attack.

  The great front window burst in a shower of glass. Instantly there was a scramble for cover. Red-uniformed shapes poured in, firing their weapons. Horne, behind part of the communications equipment, fired back and so did every alien who had a gun. Searing beams flashed and cracked. The room was filled in seconds with smoke and a smell of burning. The slaves who had been searching the inner rooms came back with guns and fired from the shelter of the doorways. But they were using unfamiliar weapons and the guards, trained fighting-men, outnumbered them.

  Ardric, pinned down by the great bulk of the hairy alien from Allamar, said with vicious satisfaction, “My men will kill every damn one of you.” And Horne knew he was right.

  Where were Ewan and Yso and the other slaves? What had happened in the outer galleries?

  If they didn't come soon, they wouldn't need to come at all.

  He fired at the red uniforms and choked on the smoke and the stench of the dying.

  There came then a deep far sound like wind or the voice of the sea. It grew and grew swiftly, and the attacking guards heard it and became irresolute, and the fire slackened.

  Half a dozen one-man cones and two larger ones spewed in a line out of the street to the left of the plaza. The guards who had been attacking Horne's force ran out to meet them, waving their arms. Then more men in red uniforms came running out of the street. Some of them were wounded. Others kept stopping every few feet to turn and fire and then run again. They mingled with the other guards and they all milled around for a moment and the cones hovered overhead. The two armed cones fired back also along the street.

  A beam shot out from between the building and knocked one of the cones reeling back, its grav shields fused. There was burst of sporadic firing both in the air and on the ground. Then the red-uniformed men broke and ran and the cones followed them, and out from the street came the two-man cone with Yso at the controls, her yellow hair flying and Fife crouched beside her over the weapon-panel, firing like a demon and missing more often than not. After her came a string of wobbly cones manned by creatures of every sort sufficiently humanoid to fit them, and a flying cluster of green furry balls with weapons in their tentacles.

  On the street below them came the army of the slaves, an outworld legion of incredible, beautiful, ugly, grotesque, laughable, horrifying beings, welded into a vast brotherhood by their common need for freedom and their hatred of the Vellae. From Fringe worlds far away they had been brought and driven like laboring beasts. Now the hour of their vengeance had come and there was no ruth or mercy in them. They were blood-mad and not even guns firing in th
eir faces could stop them. Seeing this, the nerve of the guards gave way and they fell back, faster and faster.

  The aliens poured into the plaza. They came like a flooding river that widened and surged and filled all the space there was and the red uniforms were swept away.

  In the communications center there was now a strange quiet. Horne felt almost deafened by it. He stood still, shaking his head, swaying just a little with the swift weakness of relief. He did not believe it, but it was true. They had won.

  This far, they had won.

  He ran out into the square with his few remaining followers, and close beside him the nine-foot one carried Ardric with him, helpless in the grip of those mighty hands.

  Chell came and dropped down over them. “Better take off that red suit, Horne,” he said. “These ones are in no mood to ask who's inside it before they kill you.” He looked around.

  "Where's D'quar? It was his voice that turned the tide. Some of us could hear him bellowing over the guard's radios that you had taken the Administration Center, and the guards began to waver, and that did it."

  The purple gargoyle raised his head, made even more hideous by burns and blood, and smiled ruefully.

  "It wasn't exactly true,” he said.

  "It worked though,” said Chell. He wrapped his tentacles joyously around Horne and the gargoyle. Then he remembered something and spoke to them sadly. “Ewan's dead. He brought down the first guard and got the rising started, but they killed him."

  Ardric had not said a word since Lurgh had pulled Horne off of him. He spoke now, standing like a child in the grip of those mighty arms, his face white with fury and fear of the crowding unhuman bodies, furred and scaled, hairy and naked, and of the baleful unhuman eyes that looked at him hungering for his life.

  "You've cheated me twice now, Horne,” he said. “You were supposed to die in the wreck, and when I heard you were on your way to Rillah, I even left the project to make sure you didn't get through."